


the rain falls on the wrong year

by Mizzy



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Light Angst, M/M, Pre-Slash, Scars, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Tony Angst, Vomiting, fluff disguised as angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 17:22:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20952086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mizzy/pseuds/Mizzy
Summary: Tony's soulmark is an abomination. If anyone sees his broken soulmark, they'll know Tony is broken too





	the rain falls on the wrong year

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rowantreeisme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rowantreeisme/gifts).

> Happy birthday, Rowan!! <3

Tony's soulmark is an abomination.

Everyone else has shapes that make sense, unbroken lines and pretty patterns. When you find the person (or people) who match your pattern exactly, they're yours, they fit in your life perfectly. That's just common knowledge.

No one knows how it happened. There are whispers it was a deal, by the magic users who worked beneath the surface, slipped between the cracks, but no one knows the truth, beyond the whispers that there's no magic left on Earth anymore.

* * *

Maria is distraught but Howard is almost pleased when they look down at the mark slowly coming clear on Tony’s chest. Their poor baby, she’s busy thinking, their poor baby.

"If we're to keep our son safe," Howard says, "maybe this is for the best. This way he won't waste time looking for romance. He won't be distracted by his soulmate."

He doesn't specify which son they're keeping safe and Maria is too scared to ask for clarification.

She doesn't think she would be content with either answer.

* * *

There are three things that the marks have in common.

One: they're unique, the design shared only by the person (or people) who are your soulmate (or soulmates.)

Two: they're made of silver-lines that come in after birth, etched somewhere on your chest or back. Somewhere close to your heart.

Three: they're always symmetrical.

* * *

Tony thinks of watching Jarvis cook when he was a small child. How Tony would sneak into the kitchen to be soothed by the sounds of cooking. How hypnotic the process was, as Jarvis made pasta, rolling out the dough, deftly slicing it by hand before dropping it into roiling water, the burner glowing fiery orange beneath the pan. Tony would turn the hand-carved hourglass for him, and when the sand ran out, Jarvis would fish out some noodles. Threw them against the kitchen tiles. See what stuck and what fell away.

Tony's chest is a wall of asymmetrical broken spaghetti marks.

Not many people have seen it, and all who have signed documents to keep it secret.

Tony grows up learning his soulmark is something to be hidden.

* * *

Tony tries to draw it once, pulling up his shirt to trace the lines down. His fingers are too clumsy, but he thinks he's done a good job. He's smart and skilled with his hands, everyone says so. His dad is the only person Tony knows who is not impressed by him. It just means Tony has to get better, faster. Howard's displeasure gnaws at him like an unsatisfiable hunger.

Tony smiles down at the paper, at the asymmetrical mess of lines and curves that make no sense. Even though it's not symmetrical, maybe someone else has this? There are websites, where you can upload your pattern, find a match. When Tony's old enough, maybe he can find his soulmate.

But his pleasant daydream is interrupted. Howard stares at him in appalled horror for a long moment, before he moves, swift as a storm, yanks Tony’s shirt down, burns the paper, orders him never to show anyone, _never. _Tony's soulmark is wrong. There's nothing in Tony's future but what he can make himself, with his own hands and his mind. If anyone sees his broken soulmark, they'll know Tony is broken too.

Tony learns one more emotion: shame.

* * *

Unlike his mark, life has a recognizable shape, a set of lines and patterns that make sense. Tony gets up, drinks, invents, drinks some more, ignores his company, drinks, parties hard, and despite what the press thinks, he leaves every party alone.

Tony's reluctant to imagine the reaction, if a romantic partner saw his mangled soulmark. What they'd think of him. So he flirts and teases but doesn't whisper promises that he knows he could never keep.

There are amendments to the pattern.

His parents die.

Tony gets up, drinks, invents, drinks some more, ignores his company, let's Pepper fix it up, drinks, parties hard, and despite what the press thinks, he leaves every party alone.

His company nearly dies. Who gives a billion-dollar company to the control of someone who was a cog in a secretary pool, mere weeks before? Tony Stark, that's who. He doesn't want to manage the company. He's never wanted to manage the company. He's never wanted the damn company. What he wants is to lose himself in his inventions, the only good thing about himself that Tony even likes.

Unfortunately, if he doesn't do something, his company will die, and all the people in it will suffer. Next to that, it doesn't matter what Tony wants. Tony doesn't know why he ever thought it did.

So Tony gets up, drinks, invents much less than his brain aches for, drinks some more, fixes his company himself even though it makes him miserable, drinks, parties hard, and despite what the press thinks, he leaves every party alone.

No matter what happens, the pattern reverts.

Until the landmine.

* * *

Like Tony's soulmark, his memories of Siancong are made of jagged splinters that he can't constitute into a whole.

At first he fades in and out of consciousness, pain the punctuation of these flickering moments. He can almost parse the still images of disjointed terror into a timeline; later, these memories will pass through his mind like a terrifying flipbook, shadows stitching the shapes of his pain together.

It's when he reaches the part of the experience that isn't blocked out by the agony that his brain will carefully black out parts of it to protect him. (Later, a computer program will reconstitute them while it rebuilds his broken body and it's almost enough to break him. But that's a problem for future Tony, and current Tony, in-agony Tony, being-broken-apart-and-tortured Tony, would just be glad at the thought there is a future, because right now he's bleeding, stripped down, and unsure that the future's something that _should_ exist, let alone _will_.)

Yinsen's face crowds close, whispering prayers or apologies or reassurances. The syllables take a while to coalesce into anything coherent; he's surprised when he realizes that they've been spoken in English the entire time. Tony doesn't deserve kind sentiments; they sound like a foreign language to him.

Yinsen's death, a sacrifice to secure Tony a future, makes even less sense.

* * *

Once rescued, Tony awakes to a tearful team of doctors. They're distressed. He waits to hear his death sentence. What Yinsen did to save him was a band-aid, a temporary elastic band to hold him together that surely will snap, sooner or later.

"How long have I got?" Tony snaps, interrupting their rambling. He doesn't need to be soothed, he just needs to know how many days he has left to put his affairs in order. He has years of missteps to put right, sins to amend for; he can't waste precious minutes hearing his upcoming death sentence prettied up.

"Uh," his surgeon says, looking confused, "what do—"

Tony's used to being the smartest person in the room, knows he has to notch down his intelligence sometimes so people don't run screaming and yet they still call him egotistical when he can't hide how fast his brain works. But he's injured and in pain and none of his doctorates are medical, surely he can't be the smartest person in _this_ room on this matter?

"How long do I have left to live?" Tony resents the fact that he has to put it into words.

"Mr. Stark, you misunderstand. If you reduce the strain on your heart and follow our guidance, there's no reason to think you couldn't live a long and healthy life," the surgeon says.

Tony is not used to be being the dumbest person in the room. That must be what's happening right now, because his medical team still looks at him like he should be grieving. "Then why are you all looking like someone who shot my puppy?"

* * *

Tony laughs when they tell him. At first they look comforted, mistaking it for hysteria, but as he continues to placidly accept what they've told him without any distress, their expressions shift into uneasy disquiet. Their faces spell clearly what they're thinking: _anyone normal would have been gutted by what we had to say._

Tony isn't anyone normal. He never has been.

They apologize for what they did to him. The word _butchered_ was used, incorrectly in Tony's opinion. Normally, they whispered, people have a photograph by now, some visual evidence of what should have been there. But there were no photos of Tony's soulmark, not even in his medical records, not even with his lawyer. He can see it happen as they justify it among themselves—Tony's rich, of course he'd hide it so someone couldn't fake it, to lure him into a marriage with false pretenses and steal his vast fortune—and that seems to soothe them. They promise they would have asked him, if they could, but he'd been unconscious, so they'd done what they could to save his life.

That meant guessing at what his soulmark was supposed to look like as they reconstructed his chest as best as they could. The landmine had shredded him to pieces. They’d done their best, they promised.

_Please don't sue us,_ he hears, in-between their gentle justifications.

It's rarely up to him. Tony lets his legal department do what they want. Whatever means he has fewer memos to read.

* * *

Tony loves being Iron Man. He loves it. Saving people, flying with barely anything between him and the open sky, being a _hero._ When people look at him in adoration, it doesn't feel unearned or artificial. Iron Man can deserve the praise, even when Tony Stark can't.

But Iron Man is a strain on his heart. Tony tries to avert his gaze when he changes his chestplate. If he doesn't look at his mangled mark, at the proof Howard was right, that's he's _broken,_ he can live in denial. His soulmark was a tragedy before. He doesn't need to see how even more shattered apart he is now.

But placing the chestplate is a fucking disaster. He has to put the three prongs directly into his heart. He can't do that without seeing. For the first few weeks it's okay, because even when he catches the briefest of glimpses, the mark is still healing and it doesn't make sense.

Until the day it does.

* * *

He has to remove the chestplate briefly every day to shower, and it was just a matter of time. The day it happens, Tony almost wants to cry when he sees the truth.

Tony’s soulmark isn’t a mess anymore. It’s symmetrical, like every other damned soulmark on the planet, with the silver lines interrupted by the silvery scars from his multiple post-Siancong surgeries.

He does laugh. Laugh until he sinks to the floor, hiccups into his knees, and gravity slips on its axis, tilting the world to one side.Tony has a symmetrical soulmark. He's always had one. It was just waiting for shrapnel to rip it apart, for his skin to be pieced back together. Whatever magic was behind the marks knew Tony deserved to suffer, needed that crucible of fire to be reborn into someone who could deserve a soulmate.

Except that's not even right. His soulmark is symmetrical but it's still a fucking joke. His soulmark isn't broken, exactly. He has a soulmate. He knows exactly who his soulmate is. Everyone does.

Tony's soulmark: a five-pointed star, contained in neat, concentric circles.

Captain America's shield.

Captain America's soulmark.

For years, Tony's believed that he's worthless. Now the universe might be having some sort of joke at Tony's expense. Captain America's soulmate. _Him. _Tony laughs himself silly until he's sick with it, until there's nothing but whiskey and bile and blood decorating his toilet bowl.

Tony has a soulmate after all, he's just been dead for five decades and counting.


End file.
